1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to the interactions between mobile handset and it's a server within a network, and more specifically to the ability to create questionnaires using a mobile handset, store them in a network, disseminate them and collect results.
2. Related Art
Electronic devices, such as mobile phones and personal digital assistants (PDA's), often contain small screens with very limited viewing area. They are constrained in terms of how much information can be displayed, and in terms of user interaction capabilities. The keyboards on cell phones, for example, are not conducive for user data entry, and only brief user inputs can be solicited from a user without annoying the user.
Often a user would want to ask his friend which movie from a selection of movies currently playing that they want to see. A user has to cumbersomely call up each of his friends and repeat the same questions, talk about movies currently showing, and ask them which one they would want to see in a group today. The whole process is time consuming, expensive, and requires all his friends to be available for the conversation to be satisfactorily completed.
User interaction in real time, such as those provided for a user using a PC on the Internet, are often not possible for a user using a cell phone. For example, the amount of textual information cannot be a full page of textual information that is typically made available o a PC. Graphical information also cannot be large. A typical website provides a rich multi-media experience. The same website, when accessed from a cell phone, would not only be unreadable, due to its large amount of text, graphics and even video, but also frustrating due to the nature of web sites—the design of websites often being multi-media based (predominantly providing large multi-media web pages full of text, graphics, flash-based and even containing videos). Thus, there is a problem in presenting a mobile user with information in order to solicit user input when the user is using a cell phone. Soliciting user input from a user when the user is using a cell phone, rather than a PC, is a big problem.
Cell phones are therefore a device for which traditional websites are ill prepared to provide information. In addition, surveys or questionnaires that are created for Internet based access via a PC are not appropriate for cell phone access. Asking one or more detailed questions with information on how to answer them is possible on a web page that is accessed from a PC. However, the same web page would be unmanageable and difficult to browse and navigate on a cell phone with a small LCD screen and small keyboard for user input.
Quite often a user of a mobile device would like to determine where his friends would like to have dinner among all the nearby restaurants. The user may have to call each and every one of his interested friends to determine their preferences, in order to determine which restaurant would be the preferred one. This would take at least as many calls as the number of interested friends, and would take the same amount of time for each such call, and incur significant costs to the user. There does not exist an easy way for a user to send questionnaires from his mobile device, especially optimizing on the ability of the user to employ voice on the mobile device.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of ordinary skill in the art through comparison of such systems with the present invention as set forth in the remainder of the present application with reference to the drawings.